Tag: innovation

Uber fight is 100 years old

who knew “disruption” wasn’t invented in sv????

The mid-1910s saw an explosion of people driving unlicensed cabs. They were called jitneys (slang for a nickel, which was also what they typically cost) and cities across the US scrambled to regulate them.

Today, cities around the world are struggling to regulate modern-day jitney coordination companies—ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft. But unlike the ragtag cabs of a century ago, the modern day jitney company is well-financed, and plans on throwing plenty of money around to make sure it’s not regulated out of existence.

Fossilized ideas

The recurrence of ideas over the course of history is something that Jung or Pauli would have attributed to archetypes in the collective unconscious. An alternative would be the finiteness of human imagination, and susceptibility to cultural influence. While scientific theories can become increasingly technical and abstract, the brains that struggle to interpret their meaning haven’t evolved much in the past 50 ka. If our own brain is a kind of living fossil, it’s hardly surprising that so much of what we do with it is metaphorically fossilised too.

Helix RE

construction is one of the most hidebound, wasteful, and slow industries. until we can build 100x faster, we’ll be stuck with detroit-style bombed-out cities and decrepit suburbia. related, this sensor-heavy building management system from microsoft

Excited to see my most recent investment announced today! Flux (now Helix.Re) is the first Google X spinout, taking a data and software-driven approach to building design and optimization.

VC for the people

usually basic income proposals stop at the feasibility analysis. not here:

the state could provide venture capital to the people. If ordinary citizens had a small but reliable annuity, too modest to live comfortably but enough to prevent destitution, then at the margin, we’d expect people who currently seek or accept unfulfilling, underpaid work to opt for entrepreneurship, or education, or art, or child-rearing, or just hold out for a better gig. “VC for the people” would combine a reduction in labor supply with a lot of new labor demand, forcing employers to increase wages and encouraging substitution of capital for the least desirable jobs. Both the wage effect and the annuity itself would increase the share of national income available to those without direct claims on capital, reducing inequality.

Tesla Energy

A fitting memento on the day when Tesla announces plans to bring 50 GWh / year of li-ion battery online (current world production is 27 GWh): The Tesla induction motor has been called one of the 10 greatest inventions of all time.
2015-03-10: Check out this site visit at the first Gigafactory. When complete, it will be the largest footprint manufacturing building in the world. The scale can be deceiving; this 2-story structure is 24m tall.

2016-10-28: The powerwall is extremely impressive. The difference between wantrepreneurs like “secret” and actual ones is off the scale

Musk didn’t waste anybody’s time. He used that time to present a problem of critical importance (eliminating humanity’s use of fossil fuels), explained how it can be addressed, and offered a plausible solution in the form of a new product — one that’s priced within reach of a lot of people and available to order. Amazingly, all of those things are actually pretty rare to see in one show. Tesla’s presentation was inspiring, and Musk wasn’t selling some fancy scifi trinket that has the benefit of Star Trek nostalgia. Dude was selling a battery.

2019-06-07: Tesla has a big lead for dry batteries

Tesla cars have been able to last for 1.6M km but starting in 2020 the battery packs will be able to last for 1.6M km. Currently, the battery packs last for 500-800K km. Most non-electric cars only can last 160-320K km. Tesla will start using battery domination in 2020 with significantly longer lasting and higher energy density batteries. This will enable Tesla to use a mix of better prices and higher performance to win electric cars, electric trucks and with electric taxis.

2019-10-15: They’re investing in their battery manufacturing

Tesla bought Hibar Systems, a world leader in the development of battery manufacturing technology. Hibar is truly unique in its capability to provide the world’s leading manufacturers with innovative advanced automation solutions that are engineered specifically to suit their production automation requirements ranging from simple single station bottle filling systems to sophisticated high-speed assembly systems running in excess of 1000 parts per minute. This unique capability is made possible through Hibar’s vertically integrated structure.

2019-11-30: Over time, their batteries can get 3x cheaper

Lithium Ion batteries can get 3x cheaper than current average prices of $180 per kwh to $50-60 per kwh.

2020-10-02: By doing all this, they’re speeding up the industry by decades.

If Tesla achieves the goals of Battery Day then they bring forward the electrification of transportation and energy by decades. BloombergNEF projected lithium-ion batteries to halve their cost by 2030. Tesla plans to halve the cost by 2023. Half of what Tesla would do in 2030 and 2031 would surpass the cumulative projection of energy storage installations by 2040.

2020-10-21: They’ve, as of late 2020, achieved 5m km lifespans. This is enough charge cycles to last 25 years, longer than the cars, so the batteries can be reused for other applications, and can do other functions like grid storage.

If batteries become 2x cheaper over 7 years and 120 Gigabattery factories are made then combustion engine cars are replaced and Tesla is worth 50x more than today.

Shenzhen

Bunnie Huang, a Research Affiliate for the MIT Media Lab with a PhD at MIT in EE, shares some stories about crossing the gap from a single home-made prototype to mass production, using supply chain services located in the Shenzhen area of China.

2015-06-04:

HAX invites teams with working prototypes to come to Shenzhen, China, for 4 months. Once they arrive, creators work with experts in a variety of fields to shape their designs, products and strategies. It’s like a boot camp for the world’s hardware-heads, in the heart of the most frenzied manufacturing hub on the planet.

i like to make fun of kickstarter but this is really cool, and much more useful than Y Combinator.
2015-08-10:

When it comes to manufacturing, no place in the world has the same kind of allure as the Pearl River Delta region of China. Within just a hour-long train ride, 2 vastly different cultures co-exist, each with its unique appeal that keeps attracting engineers, entrepreneurs and hustlers alike. On the mainland side, cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou bring the promise of cheap components, low-cost contract work, and the street cred of “having done the Shenzhen thing.” And on the island, the capitalist utopia called Hong Kong glows with all of its high finance and stories of lavish expat lifestyles.

2017-01-20:

Shenzhen completed 11 skyscrapers. That’s more than the US and Australia combined.

2017-02-05: if you want to bring manufacturing back, you have to switch to open source hardware and scrap all the patents overhead. as long as everything is slowed down by lawyers, shenzhen will innovate 3-10x faster.

Leftovers Barter

another entrant in the sharing economy: a barter system for leftovers. it works much better than you’d think.

it’s built on the premise of people who don’t know each other sharing homemade food, with no money exchanged. Picture scaling that up to an entire city, far beyond anyone’s natural circle of trust.

by not charging they are doing an end run around health inspections. we’ll see how long that lasts. i have heard anecdotally that pro chefs are interested in this model because it would allow them to get rid of the parts of a restaurant that they aren’t as good at (getting a space, dealing with people etc) and just focus on the cooking.